After study at Warsaw, Łomża, and Włocławek, Wyszyński was ordained on his 23rd birthday, Aug. 3, 1924, and was assigned to the basilica at Włocławek. After gaining a doctorate in sociology and ecclesiastical law at the Catholic University of Lublin, he studied further in France, Italy, and Belgium. Back in Poland, he founded the Christian Workers University in 1935 and directed it until 1939, when the Nazi and Soviet forces invaded Poland. Shortly after, his bishop, Msgr. Michał Kozal, ordered him to leave Włocławek, and he thus escaped the fate of 1,811 Polish priests, including his own bishop, who perished in German concentration camps.

He returned to Włocławek as rector of the seminary in March 1945; one year later he was appointed bishop of Lublin, and on Nov. 12, 1948, Pope Pius XII transferred him to the primatial see of Gniezno and, ad personam, of Warsaw. On Nov. 29, 1952, he was named cardinal but was unable to go to Rome to receive formal investiture with a cardinal’s red hat until 1957. Meanwhile, although he had signed a coexistence agreement with the Communists, he refused to lend the church’s authority to the regime’s many acts of persecution.

In 1953, during the last repressive spasm of the Stalinist period, he was put under house arrest without trial when the government claimed that he had violated a pledge that the church would punish priests who engaged in anti-government activity. In 1956, shortly after Władysław Gomułka came to power, the Cardinal was released. He concluded an agreement with Gomułka that allowed religious instruction in state schools provided that Communist approval was sought over appointments to higher church offices. Wyszynski’s compromise defused a crisis that might have culminated in Soviet invasion and repression, as occurred at that time in Hungary. Gomułka’s and Wyszynski’s uneasy accord continued even under Gomułka’s successor, Edward Gierek, although the Cardinal lent cautious support to such Polish movements as the Workers’ Defense Committee, Solidarity, and Rural Solidarity, which sought greater freedom from the late 1970s onward.

Doctrinally, he was a strong conservative, and he played an important role in electing John Paul II pope in 1978. Wyszyński was often called the Primate of the Millennium. Twenty years after his death, the Polish church celebrated 2001 as the year of Stefan Wyszyński.